


Not a Lottery

by NevillesGran



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canonical Child Abuse, Other, rural america gothic?, vague mythology vibe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 07:25:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11709648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: When Kash read “The Lottery”, he got about a third of the way through before he put his head down on his knees and laughed until he cried.





	Not a Lottery

**Author's Note:**

> Like 90% of this should be taken as my headcanon for canon, too, but I really wanted to reference [some modern literature.](http://fullreads.com/literature/the-lottery/)

When Kash read “The Lottery”, he got about a third of the way through before he put his head down on his knees and laughed until he cried. Then he swung himself out of bed and crossed the seven-steps width of his shitty apartment, grabbed a bottle of shittier whiskey, and drank straight from the bottle.

What the fuck. What the _fuck_. Who wrote that? No—who literally put that down on paper? Who dared? It couldn’t be real. It had to be a story of a story of a story, put to words by someone who had _no_ idea of the truth. No idea how it really worked, and no idea that it wasn’t something you just _wrote down_.

He stalked back to where he’d dropped the computer and scrolled down, because he hated himself. Stoning, yeah—that wasn’t how it was done. Well, maybe in some places. Sure as hell not in Kash’s town. Once a year? Shit, that was frequent. How did you even sustain that with population of only a few hundred…

In Kash’s town, it was (had been) only every sixteen years that the people lined up, and only the women of the town. The mayor would stand with them for the sake of ceremony, but it was every woman of childbearing age who mattered, in a half-circle in the town square, just past sunset on the day after Midsummer.

The shape of a woman would walk out of the fields. Her hair was corn silk and Her skirts their greening husks; Her body was summer winds and Her eyes heat lightning. She would pause a moment, looking them over, but only for a moment. She knew Her own mind (what idiots left the selection to mere _chance?_ ) She walked across the silent square to Her choice, slow and inexorable as a coming storm, and drew three sharp nails down the woman’s belly. The first claim of blood.

Then She would walk back into the fields and vanish, and sometime that winter, the woman with three lines scoured into her belly would have a child. She would have already been pregnant, of course. A goddess wasn’t wrong about these things. Most often from the town’s little Beltane party, that they pretended they didn’t hold but all the young people got drunk at anyway, and most of the old as well. Sometimes elsewise, and who knew either way—it was considered bad luck to check, for most of May and June. (Nobody said which way the bad luck went.)

Then she would give the child up, because it wasn’t hers—it never had been. It was the Kashaw Vesh, “Chosen of the Lady of the Fields” in some ancient tongue, and boy did being named _that_ do a number on your head. It would be raised by committee, it-takes-a-village as literal as possible. Passed around as an infant then sleeping wherever once he was old enough to choose—he most cycles, though sometimes she. Vesh didn’t care.

It was a pretty idyllic childhood, so far as Kash could tell. He didn’t know anything else but he’d read some books, and spent time with the other children of the town. Pulling them out of school when they were supposed to be learning was about the only thing he wasn’t allowed to do, not much at least. He had some extra lessons of his own, usually in the evenings with the elders of the town, and those were mostly just reiterations of his responsibility. Which was…live. Run around outside in every kind of weather just to taste the air. Sleep at every hearth and eat at every table; he could get to all of them in half a year if he kept track and had lunch and dinner in separate homes. There was the Internet, too, but the Kashaw was always chided to go outside and play. Talk to people. Work up a sweat and an ache in his back in the fields every harvest time, because there was always work to do even when they had machines to do most of it, in the 21st century. Machines cost money, and a town like Kashaw’s didn’t have much. Vesh kept away the worst of those who would buy them all out and turn the fields into a wasteland for tax benefits, or grazing for cattle to further break the planet, but it still wasn’t all easy.

Nobody was supposed to come to him with troubles; he wouldn’t speak to Vesh again until he was fifteen. They did anyway. Or Kashaw noticed when they wanted to, when people passed with sideways glances and words bitten back. He knew everyone in town—how could he not know when Jim Fletcher was getting anxious because he hadn’t had work in eight months, or Annie O’Brian thought she’d never get a date to homecoming if she didn’t skip every other meal, or the Lehmans’ new baby was so colicky the doctor was concerned he’d just up and stop breathing sometime, and the nearest real hospital was over an hour away.

Kashaw figured out pretty early that if he scratched his nails down the three-stripe birthmark on his arm, harsh and enough to draw a couple drops of blood, he could help. He could _heal_. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was supposed to happen in the modern day, but neither was the shape of a woman made of hot summer winds walking from the fields. He could do everything else just normally—raise fences and babysit _gratis_ , whip around a hat for someone whose purse was low, show up at the high school every lunch to make sure Annie ate a sandwich (in retrospect, Kash found himself _incredibly_ annoying.) But healing was the best. When Drew Melton got his arm stuck in the combine harvester, Kashaw figured out that he could draw a little more power if he gave himself a whole new cut, and over the years they built up until one entire arm was nothing but scars. It was such an easy bargain, a few drops of blood for a breath of power over life and death—because husband and wife were supposed to share, weren’t they? You couldn’t be equals, not with a goddess, but She shared.

“You are Her light,” Gran Pickett told him once, when he was about thirteen. Their hands were clasped, his young and dark to hers gnarled with age, and blood trickled from his arm as he tried to ease the stabbing pain of her arthritis. She squeezed gently. “She is darkness, and the end of all things, but you are life. You carry all our lives here—” she reached up and touched his heart—“and you will remind Her, when the time comes, that we are all worth living.”

“But it won’t last,” said Kashaw. Partly because the ceremony was less than two years away, starting to loom in his mind, and partly because he knew, in the way he sometimes just did, that Gran wouldn’t live to see it. She wouldn’t see the end of this summer, likely. He tried to be impartial, because he had a whole town to speak for, but he’d always liked Gran one of the best. Like him, she was communal family—didn’t have any grandkids but everyone called her “Gran” anyway.

“Oh, life never does.” Gran smiled her wrinkled smile at him. She knew she wouldn’t last the summer, either. “But you fight for it anyway, you hear?”

Soon enough, Kashaw’s wedding day arrived, his fifteenth birthday. It was late January—he was a Beltane child, they thought, but he’d been a little early, a little small. Lived just fine, though, and that was what he was for.

Everybody gathered in the town square again, spilling into the streets around. Kashaw wore a nice, collared shirt and clean new jeans, even though it didn’t matter. Mayor Willard, still in office after sixteen years, got particularly fussy about such things when he was nervous.

Vesh walked out of the fields at mid-morning. In the summer, they said, Her hair was bright corn silk and her skirts the fresh green husks. Now the silk was dead, dark with rot, and the husks were worse, dry and flaking. There was the lightest dusting of snow on the cold, dark ground; it blew up where She stepped.

She stopped in the center of the square, and held out one imperious hand, palm up. Her voice was the rasp of dry wind against hard earth:

“ _Myy husssband._ ”

Kashaw swallowed and stepped forward, because that was his entire purpose here. “My wife.”

In the split second before She took his hand, he met the spark of Her eyes and felt Her delight, so pure it was almost childish, and he thought maybe this really wouldn’t be that bad. Nobody had ever been clear on what exactly would happen to him after She took him, but the general consensus seemed to be that She would listen to him, enjoy his company, keep him not quite alive anymore but not dead either, the way gods were. He would help Her watch over the town, which She would love just as he did because they would be one, as husband and wife were meant to be. Knowing each other completely.

Then his hand was in Hers, scarred and only slightly timid, and Her other slashed down his arm and he _screamed_ as fifty mirrored scars appeared at once. Her form was made of biting wind, winter-freezing and summer-burning at once, and the ghost of Her nails leeched the blood from him like drought killed fresh crops in the field, and returned fifteen years of other peoples’ pain in one blinding moment.

Then She kissed him and Kashaw knew Her, oh yes, and She knew him, and through him the town—and She did not give a single shit. She protected them because She was weak, in the face of greater powers, and they fed Her well every sixteen years, but She was not _capable_ of caring. She did not even care to be. She was the early, deadly frost, and the late one that killed when you’d just started to hope. She was the choking dust storm and the raging tornado, and the heat that sapped life from everything it touched. She was the flash flood that didn’t care what it struck, and the giant threshing machines that cared even less.

Except that She enjoyed it. Rich and poor, sick and well—Vesh didn’t care who suffered, but She loved every second of it. She luxuriated in it. She was death, the end of all things, but she was life if it brought more pain. She was clouds of locusts and She was a slow, lingering death, and She was the rot of dying plants so that something could live again, and suffer, burn, freeze, die.

It wasn’t instinct, because no instinct could be that suicidal. It sure as hell wasn’t thought out. It wasn’t anything, really, relative to that heartless vastness of power. Nobody with the faintest understanding of “fairness”, or who didn’t know Kashaw’s thoughts and desires absolutely in that moment, would have recognized and judged it as a strike to kill Her.

Vesh was both. She _smiled_.

Kash had read some of the more interesting parts of the Bible, and even attended a few Seders over the years. He’d heard the stories and slipped drops on wine onto his plate. You were allowed to have other religions than Vesh—this was America, after all. In fact, Church was very popular.

He’d never wondered what it would be like to have all ten plagues at once. Vesh smiled and darkness fell, insects swarmed, storms raged. People died. A few feet behind Kashaw, the mayor fell covered in boils, every illness that had never swept through the town. Far too the right, Leah O’Brian, Annie’s younger sister whom he’d nearly kissed last Beltane, choked on a cloud of buzzing locusts who had never touched their fields. Elaine Hitchens, who had always smiled at him so sadly that Kashaw thought she might be his birth mother, fell with her temple gashed open by a hailstone, from a storm that had once—decades before Kashaw, this one, was born—passed around the town. Vesh saved them all so that when She wanted, how She wanted, She could rain death, and glory in it.

When it stopped, seconds later, Kashaw still stood untouched save for his bleeding arm, and Vesh’s hand scouring against his cheek. Around them, not a body stirred for miles, and half the buildings listed sideways.

She tilted his chin up again, as if to kiss him again, and carved his left eye from its socket. It was golden, they both were; the elders of the town had always said that was a sign of Her favor. Kash didn’t remember, later, if he’d screamed again at that point or if he’d still been screaming, or if he’d been struck absolutely dumb. Vesh threw the eye over Her shoulder, holding him tighter as he shook, and replaced it with one of her own. The loss didn’t seem to affect her. It _burned_ Kashaw, a constant electrical shock—and then it didn’t. And then it was just an eye again.

Vesh patted his cheek again, the sting of sleet and burning wind. She seemed satisfied. “ _Myyy hussbannd._ ”

Then She turned and walked away, back into the fields, and four years later, Kash realized he’d just punched the wall so hard there were plaster chips and his knuckles were bleeding. Right. Okay. This particular English assignment clearly wasn’t getting done.

It was just a shitty online course. You couldn’t really take better classes when you didn’t officially exist and all your references were dead.

He still didn’t know if they’d all been genuinely wrong about Vesh, or if everyone in town had lied to him all his life. A little of both, probably. He wasn't even sure he could call them cowards for it.

His hand stopped bleeding as he looked at it, with a scrape of sandpaper-dry wind like a laugh over the skin. Stoning, yeah. Stoning sounded nice. Fast. Final.

 


End file.
